Hi! I’m so glad I found this subreddit. Lots of great advice and I’ll need it as I’m two months in to studying Chinese full-time (loving it btw).
I thought I’d share my recent experiences sitting the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) and how I was able to achieve a pretty high score (160). The MLAT is used in my workplace (Australian Military) to determine someone’s aptitude for learning languages. I’m pretty sure it’s used by the US and UK forces and various universities and other organizations too.
The reason I’m writing this post is that the advice from the testers and from others who have done the test before was that “You can’t study for the MLAT…It’s not that kind of test”. I found this to be absolute rubbish. I hope that if any of you are going to sit the MLAT or other language aptitude tests in the future you might be able to learn from my experiences.
Background: To get accepted to the School of Languages, I needed to do well on the MLAT. You are only allowed to sit the MLAT twice in your career and you need to wait over 12 months before your second try. Thus, this is something I needed to do well on or I'd never get another go.
There are 5 possible scores (fail, level 1, 2, 3, and 4). My understanding is that a lot of people fail – it’s a very hard test if you don’t know what to expect. The level you get determines what languages are available to you. Languages like Chinese and Japanese are up at level 4 and those more similar to English are at 1.
My experiences: I did the test for the first time last year and did not study whatsoever. I’m generally pretty good at English and languages and I scored a level 2 (not bad). This meant I could only be accepted to do European languages and a few others. I really wanted to do Chinese though so after 12 months I reapplied.
This time around I trawled google and found there was very little information out there – certainly nothing for free. The test is pretty well guarded. There was two websites with MLAT study resources that you needed to pay for. One was $10 and the other was over $100. I really wanted to learn Chinese so I went with the $10 site. You can get quite a bit of info off this site for free but it’s well worth the 10 bucks as it steps you through each section and has hundreds of practice questions with audio and stuff. I’ve since ended my subscription but from what I remember:
Tips for the test:
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Section one is about number learning. You need to listen to a tape which will go through practice exercises before getting into the real thing. The key here was that the practice exercise language was exactly the same as the language used for the test. The voice will teach you some numbers in the new language and then say combinations of those numbers for you to write down.
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Incorrect answers do not mark you down – just guess if you have spare time!
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Section 2 was on tape again and included some of the International Phonetic Alphabet. You listen to sounds and choose which one was said from your list.
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Section 3 was ridiculous. I’m guessing no one has ever finished all the questions in the time period. There were around 50 questions for 5 mins and each was quite difficult – you needed to match misspelt words with synonyms. This is where the study came in handy, because I knew what all the sections required; I could answer the actual questions while everyone else was reading the question instructions. I ended up getting through about 30 questions in the 5 mins (and I was going fast) but then used the two minutes allocated for reading the next sections’ instructions to finish them off.
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Section 4 needed a basic understanding of sentence grammar (subject verb object as well as simple, compound, and complex sentences). This would also be very difficult to complete in the time given. You could do your own study on these, but that website takes you through it and actual question examples so you’re more familiar with what to expect.
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Section 5 was great because I’d studied. Last year I went horribly in this section. I might have got like 4/24 last time. I’m pretty sure that I got 24/24 this time though. Basically it tests your memorization and this is actually something that’s quite easy to train. The test gives you made-up words and their English ‘translation’. You then need to find the translations from multiple choice questions. If you don’t study for this section, you will almost certainly fail it.
Hope this helps and allows a few others to better prep themselves. Or, for all the polygots out there you might just want to test your aptitude without studying.
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